This isn’t from all that long ago–September, 2020–but it’s interesting and worth a repost. Tad on the longish side so if you aren’t flush with time, skim through the biography and prairie voles and get to the list of Getz’s major accomplishments. Interesting guy. Someone needs to write his biography.

I do not have words to tell you how blown away I am.

So I’ll just tell you what happened.

We’ll start with Prairie Voles (Microtus ochrogaster). Prairie Voles are one of only 4% of mammalian species which have a monogamous social structure. Males and females pair-bond for life. When one passes, the other frequently does not take a new mate, but dies soon after. Males actively participate in raising the young. In fact, excepting nursing, there’s nothing females do that males don’t do. They even sweep the floor! (jk) Males guard and protect the nest from intruder males. As a new litter of pups comes along, the previous litter remains in the nest– rather than dispersing– and also participates in caring for the infants. It’s a remarkable species– all the more remarkable because other very closely related, and co-occurring in terms of habitat, species of Voles are polygamous.

Lowell Getz was the mammalian ecologist who brought Prairie Voles’ unique social structure to the attention of the broader biological, and popular science, communities. On the occasion of Getz’s retirement from the University of Illinois, Mr. Big Food and I met Getz and we ate our box lunches together. He told us how as a boy growing up on a farm in Illinois, he’d turn over hay stacks and sometimes find a mother and her litter, and sometimes an entire family of voles. We also talked about his hobby, WWII military history, and his stint at the Army Security Agency supervising enlisted cryptanalysists.

Prairie Voles make an appearance in Miss Missy’s School. Everyone who’s read it thinks it’s pretty funny. Anyway, because kids probably don’t know about Prairie Voles, I thought I’d include a little something in The Companion Book about Getz’s fascination with voles as a kid, and his accomplishment in discovering they are monogamous. I have all of the original research papers, know the timeline of controlled experiments, etc. So that part’s easy. But although I had previously discovered that he also wrote military history papers, I wanted to know a bit more about that side of him.

[Yeah. I know. Keeps me out of trouble.]

Found his extremely long curriculum vitae which was a treasure trove. Two hundred twenty-nine research papers or review articles. Plus this:

From a lifetime of work, these are– according to Getz himself– his three Major Accomplishments:

1. Conducted a 25-year intense demographic study of free-living populations of the prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster), meadow vole, (M.  pennsylvanicus) and short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda), involving monthly live-trapping of 4-9 study sites in three habitat types.  This is the longest and most detailed such study that has been made.  The resulting data are posted in the University of Illinois Electronic Archives where they will be available permanently to workers needing large, comprehensive data sets for modeling and testing hypothesis.
2. Discovered that the prairie vole displays behavioral monogamy, a rare phenomenon among mammalian species.  This finding resulted in the prairie vole becoming a major experimental animal in the study of human affiliative behavior, including the potential for vasopressin and oxytocin in treatment of autism, schizophrenia and other such behavioral problems.
3. Identification of the man (Huston Riley) in Robert Capa’s famous photograph   of the American GI in the surf during the first wave on Omaha Beach, D-Day, 6 June 1944, credited with being the second most iconic photograph from World War II.  The GI had not been previously identified.

Blew me away.